The Gallery

ARTISTS Andrew Svanberg Hamilton SOFTWARE Realitycapture, Maya, Photoshop, Unreal Engine 4, After Effects

Discover the best digital art from the CG community

Photogrammetry played a big part in this project by Embark Studios’ art director Andrew Svanberg Hamilton. He worked on the project over a few months when time allowed with almost all content starting from a photogrammetry capture from a visit to his homeland of Australia. “The project was built as real-time game art using techniques and tools well known to me during my many years within the games industry,” he tells us, “with the goal of avoiding expensive features or rendering solutions to achieve highly realistic results.”

When working with photogrammetry many laborious aspects of the creative process are already taken care of, allowing Hamilton to spend the most time on constructing the scenes themselves. He uses Realitycapture, Maya and Photoshop to process the scanned content, before utilising Unreal to build the scenes. “This is where the actual work begins,” Hamilton explains, “attempting to recreate reality as accurately as possible. This is often a step that is overlooked in importance, in the thought that great art will simply arrive from great content, however, most perceived quality arrives from great composition and use of the content, no matter the quality or limitations set upon you by real-time requirements.”

Visiting the locations where the content was captured helped Hamilton to understand how the scenes should be constructed, and what pieces were crucial to capturing the overall impression. “It’s the fun and charm of video game development as an environment artist,” he adds, “in particular creating nature, continually attempting to strike that balance between quality and performance while replicating reality.”